As the Wicked Watch(2)
The wind whipped the air like a strap, and discarded handbills, plastic bags, and food wrappers were violently sucked into the honeycomb cells of the chain link fence surrounding the abandoned playground. Divided between areas for toddlers and for big kids, it was named in honor of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a Black investigative journalist and a total badass in her day. I wonder if she would have done a show like 60 Minutes or Dateline.
It’s amazing where the mind travels at a crime scene. I’m convinced it’s how the brain copes with the sick reality of what humans are capable of.
The playground was wholly unrecognizable from its condition just a few weeks ago when Scott and I were the first to arrive at the scene. The city has since rid the cracked concrete slab and the adjacent grassy field of trash, dandelions, and what we back in Texas call horseweed or marestail, which grows more than six feet tall. When I was a child, I used to visit my cousins on my mother’s side in Galveston, Texas. A lot of time was spent running in and around the weeds. It was funny how different they looked erupting from the concrete jungle versus the soft soil beneath a Texas sun, as statuesque as pine trees. The bark was so thick that if you cut it, some inexplicable white liquid would’ve probably squirted out. My lack of appreciation for it all was lost in my understanding of why curious prepubescent boys would be drawn to a place that so effectively cloaked their mischief as they pored over their discoveries.
That it once was a children’s play area named after a Black woman who paved the way for people like me to work as investigative journalists only made its fate that much more of a shame.
“Jordan, five! Count it!” the producer yelled.
“Scott, you can hear them. Cue me in,” I instructed. “Just yell, ‘Go!’”
He nodded.
“Okay, Jordan,” Scott said. “The desk is about to hand it offfff!”
He pointed and mouthed Go, as if a Hollywood director had burst onto the scene. His over-the-top cue nearly made me laugh. I took a deep breath, fighting the visual of his absurd gesturing, and refocused on why I was here in the first place.
“Diana, I’m at the Ida B. Wells-Barnett playground at 45th and Calumet in Bronzeville. It’s been weeks since a crew of prisoners from Cook County Jail on cleanup detail made a gruesome discovery here. Now investigators believe they’ve established a connection between the body of an African American woman found behind a dumpster at a popular South Side restaurant last week and the victim found here.”
Other news media had referred to this latest victim as a prostitute. I didn’t have the heart to describe her that way after speaking with her mother. She was somebody’s child. Labels give people a reason not to care when aired out on the news. A murder? Oh, she was just a prostitute. A victim? Police said she was on drugs. As the forty-five-second clip of my prerecorded interview with the victim’s mother played, I thought about her face, hardened by heartbreak long before her daughter was found dead and partially burned outside a dumpster. Trust me, there was no describing the look. You knew it when you saw it watching from your sofa as the local news camera moved in on a heartbroken helpless parent.
“Powerful clip!” chimed in midday anchor Diana Sorano, her genuine enthusiasm making her more audible than I’d anticipated. The wind whipped my hair across my face, and in the moist air, my face morphed from dewy but tolerable into a sweaty mess likely to spark a viewer complaint that I looked too shiny. The first raindrop splashed across my nose. I tried not to frown, but felt my eyebrows furrow, a bad habit.
“Jordan, with yet another murder of a young African American woman, what are some of the community leaders saying? Are they questioning how police are handling these cases?”
Did she lob that question at me to get me to state the obvious? That people had doubts that the police would use all the resources available to draw a connection between these two homicides, if there was one? Or was she oblivious? Of course people were asking that question. Wouldn’t you if you lived here?
“Diana, there is a growing wave of discontent over the number of unsolved murders of Black women on the South and West Sides. Now, with the murder of Tania Mosley, that number stands at eight over the last two years.”
“Thank you, Jordan, and again, I look forward to your special report, which airs tonight during the ten o’clock broadcast, with Tania’s mom.”
I wondered whether Diana fully understood what this latest murder meant. Would she be looking forward to a special report about White girls being killed? My thoughts went dark, realizing my snap judgment was unfair. She wasn’t looking forward to a report on anyone’s being killed, no matter their race. It was just that scripted language trap many anchors tended to fall into after years of seeing the same kind of story over and over again. In a few seconds, this story would vanish and the commercial break would act as a palate cleanser until the next funny video everyone was talking about or the comforting kicker about someone or some company doing a good thing. From confronting you with a murder to making you feel motivated in twenty-five minutes or less.
“She looks like a fighter,” Diana said. “My heart goes out to her. I hope she has someone to lean on for support.”
Yeah, me too. But it won’t be me. Not this time.
It started to rain lightly, but I was frozen in place, eyes locked on the camera as I waited to hear all clear from Scott.
“Okay, we’re out!” Scott shouted. “Let’s go, Jordan. Run!”